> The laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that,

And then: "The laws of nature are commendable, but here in Australia we just passed a law that all mammals must, henceforth, follow the Kangaroo's lead and include pouches on all newborn animals. Marsupials drive Australia's tourist economy, and this new measure will promote tourism and lead to rising social welfare across all walks of Australian life, human or otherwise."

That's the kind of behavior that would go a long way towards solving problems like these if more people held companies to such a high standard. Problem is they don't, for reasons discussed at length elsewhere, but including a) people don't read the TOS, b) people assume they'll never be in conflict with the company and thus any arbitration clause is not relevant to them, etc.

This is a nice suggestion. The hurdle is: where is the requirement to do something like this going to come from? The market hasn't caused it to happen. The gov't should be the ones representing us and ensuring an even playing field, but they don't.

My opinion is that we need to reform our political system so that the government represents the citizens (the way it should), rather than deep-pocketed corporate interests.

Short of that, I keep imagining some third option like some sort of "collective consumer" bargaining unit, so that large groups of customers can band together to get enough bargaining power to stand up to companies with terms or practices they don't like, but whose main product they do like.

Also, customers do have it good at first blush. We are the beneficiaries of all kinds of stuff we want enough to pay for it and we benefit from innovation. However, it is all the stuff that is unlikely to affect any one customer but is almost sure to hit the company where they get no resistance from the market. This is where the market fails.

So, yes, you want mobile phone service, but do you want binding mandatory arbitration? No, but the average customer is unlikely to feel they will be affected by that, so on average the market doesn't resist it. At least not by denying themselves mobile phone service.

The market also fails to stop the gradual creep of unwanted changes. How many of us *want* commercials when we go to the movie theater. I'll bet none. But it's a minor enough annoyance that few enough people actually forgo the enjoyment of a movie out of protest. So, we have commercials. The market is not looking after customers.

How many of us *want* to be put on someone's marketing list every time we communicate with a company about anything. Yet, the best we can get is the (often phantom) chance to opt out.

The market works to find us things that are good enough to buy. But once the market has found that, there is very little pressure to keep companies from trying to exploit their customers as much as possible.

I'd like to +1 Insightful for this article. This is something that needs to be said more and in more contexts.

We, as a nation, appear to have lost all objective criteria for the jobs of those who represent us. It's all partisan. It seems like there is nothing we will not forgive in service of our own partisan agendas.

Trump is the culmination of that. He won because he came to be seen as "for" what his supporters desired. But he has no history of working for those things, no history of delivering on what he promises, no real, tangible reason to believe he could deliver. His supporters *want* him to deliver, but they have no objective reasons to believe he can or will.

Moreover, he has shown himself to be unqualified in so many ways that are so much more unforgivable than what has ever been tolerated before.

I do not think this way of thinking is limited to Trump supporters. We are all guilty of it to some degree.

There has to be some minimum level of qualification we demand as citizens out of those who represent us. The republican and democrat candidates, as much as they may differ on policy proposals, should be nearly indistinguishable in their ethical foundation and their proven experience in government operations.

All this kind of stuff is chilling probably in exactly the way trolls want it to be. I have a desire to run a Tor exit node myself. It feels like the right thing to do for many reasons. But I don't because I don't want the hassle of dealing with any accusations like these, and because I absolutely can't afford the potential costs if the accuser gains traction in ways like DBC did in this article.

... egregious infringement of Constitutional rights .. should carry with it either a jail sentence or fine.

I agree in principle. In practice this is very hard to get right and would essentially discourage anyone from serving in government at all. But we should move closer to your suggested end of the spectrum, for sure.

Perhaps less extreme than that, I propose that there be some notion of impeachment for incompetence. That is, you're not jailed or fined, but if you demonstrate that you're incompetent at being a government official, then you should not be a government official. You should lose your job. That's also hard to define and easy to abuse, but doesn't have quite the deterrent effect for public service as jail or fines would have.

What we kind of already have, but not really, is the notion of failure to be reelected due to incompetence. Voters should hold their elected officials accountable for incompetence. That hardly happens though, due to myriad failings of our electoral systems.

The preamble says the constitution was written by the citizens (the "people of the united states"). It doesn't say it was written only to apply to citizens.

Paraphrasing, it says "We [citizens] wrote this constitution for these reasons."

More specifically, Article II, Section 1, paragraph 5 says, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, ...". There'd be no need for the qualification "except a natural born Citizen" if 'Person' was already limited only to citizens.

So it's certainly not the case that everything in the constitution only applies to or refers to citizens.

Corporations should be forced to operate within a system that is designed for and serves the citizens it represents. What we have instead is a government that is heavily influenced by and operates to serve corporations. There is lip service given to how anything that benefits corporations indirectly benefits citizens, but too often it is just whitewash.

We need to demand much more vociferously the government we're supposed to have: "government of the people, by the people, for the people" that Lincoln said shall not perish from the earth. It certainly seems to be fading if not yet perishing.

If P = NP, then P == NP by definition, unless you're running in parallel and assignment is not atomic. Then if P = NP we still need to decide if P == NP. Maybe what you really meant was NP = P. That would/could be good.

I'm hoping he ends up being better then the Clinton gangsters in the long run. he just needs to staple his mouth shut. IMHO, executive orders should be banned. Obozo's EO's were all crap also.

Trump's in quite a hole already. There's zero practical hope that he can redeem himself even to the point of being the 2nd worst president ever. It's a fun fantasy to imagine the turnaround it would take for him to even be considered "not bad" after a start like this, but just a fantasy.

> Look, there's no joy in understanding that Talbot's> emarrassment has multiplied because of his admittedly > hilarious attempt at a coverup, but the world does need> to understand that attempts to hide information in this > manner will only result in it being further spread.

The Streisanding stories on Techdirt are generally of the sort where someone tries to use copyright or some other tool of digital information suppression to hide info, and in that respect fit right in to Techdirt's bailiwick.

This one may be amusing because of they guy's failure to be even at all sophisticated. But I think it's a bit lame for it to have ended up here. There's no real link to the important issues that Techdirt generally concerns itself with. The post just seems to be mocking the guy, and then justifying it with a lame claim about the world **needing** to understand the Streisand effect?

Misusing copyright and patent law are important topics. The Streisand effect per se is not.